return to your most recognized art

we are before an artistic return of intense meaning. Manuel Segade once again brings us the work of Juan Munoz (1953-2001) when he would turn 70 and 22 years after his premature death, aged just 48. The first step is the presentation of a set of 21 excellent pieces, sculptural installations of different formats and extensions, in a setting that dialogues with the architectural characteristics of the building that houses them.

The title of the show Everything I see will outlive meis a quote from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova that Juan Muñoz collected in one of the last notes in his notebooks preparing for what was his last exhibition, at the Tate Modern in London in 2001. The title is used here as a beautiful poetic allusion to the survival of worksbeyond the expiration of the artists' lives.

The dating of the pieces is basically from the 1990s, although there is also one from 1989 and another from 2001. We are in the final phase of Juan Muñoz's creative career, in which he reached strong international recognition. The next step in this return will be another exhibition, at CA2M in Móstoles, which will open in June, coinciding with the artist's birth date, in which we will see the journey of his works from the beginning to the eighties.

[Juan Muñoz, drafting the trilero]

This game with the passage of time – recovering the work of Juan Muñoz, the great artist who left so early, in two phases that go in the opposite direction to his temporal development, from the last to the first phases – is an allusive sign of how alive and radiant his works continue to be. All of them are determined by the interaction they provoke when looking at them, an aspect emphasized by Muñoz with the use of mirrors that reflect both his sculptures and those who look at them, which are thus introduced into the interactive installation that constitutes them.

Here, at the Alcalá 31 gallery, the pieces explicitly refer us to this issue. Sara in blue dress [Sara in a blue dress] (1996) and hello specchio [In the mirror] (1997). And this is what Juan Muñoz wrote about what we can see in them and how we see it: “My characters sometimes behave like a mirror that cannot reflect. They are there to say something about your gaze, but they can't because they don't want to let you see yourself.” There we are: looking, wanting to see everything, and this flow leads you to be looked at, seen, in the reflection of the different.

A problem that persists during installation Two sentries on optical ground (1990), located at the entrance, shadow figures with weapons, which remind us of control of our gaze. And also in the balcony pieces: balcony [Balcón] (1991) and Nimes Balcony [Balcón de Nimes] (1994), in both cases balconies with nothing or no one on them, empty. “The void is not shown. The desire for it to be filled is shown. […] I don’t see the balconies empty now; They talk about anything but themselves. These are images that are already there, that have already been used”, he stated. Our gaze eliminates the void…

Coming and going in the gaze, in the vision, this is where the referential core of Juan Muñoz's works is located: nothing is closed in the immediacy of the pieces, everything remains open to the interactive flow that they provoke when our gaze approaches them. In addition to causing the “filling” of the void, the characters bring us closer to similarity from a distance. In the second half of the 1990s, this took shape in the caricatured figures of dwarfs, ventriloquist dolls and “Chinese”, as Muñoz himself identified them.

The next step in this return will be another exhibition, at CA2M in Móstoles, which opens in June, coinciding with the artist's date of birth.

Related to the latter is the recovery of the energetic sculptural installation Square (1996), which can be seen again for the first time since its presentation at the Velázquez del Retiro Palace, as part of the exhibition that the Museo Reina Sofía dedicated to the artist at the time. It is a set of 27 figures in shades of gray, of “Chinese” people who laugh. You cannot enter within the open circle they form, and so the theme of the mirror, of identity and difference, opens up as you get closeryou bypass them from the outside and end up perceiving others from yourself.

The figure hanging by its mouth from the ceiling of the room: With the rope alla bocca [Con la cuerda en la boca] (1997) and the two paper towel figures with shutters from 1999 tell us about the paradox of representation: we cannot understand the motivation of what we see.

[Juan Muñoz. Look at the eye]

We are already in the final phase of Juan Muñoz's creative journey. But, as a conclusion, the return to laughter of the figures hanging on the wall in chairs in the piece dated the year of his death, in 2001, is significant: Two sitting on the wall [Of those sitting on the wall]. Do they laugh at your possible downfall? The answer remains open, like life itself, before our desire to look and be able to see where we are going. Juan Muñoz: looking from the outside, being able to see in depth.

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